DIANA WEST: NOTHING WORTHY IN SUPPORTING IRAN’S MOUSAVI
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2980/Nothing-Worthy-in-Supporting-Irans-Mousavi.aspx
Michael Ledeen ends another year touting the allegedly Good “opposition” movement of former Iranian prime minister Mousavi, the “Green Revolution” leader under house arrest since 2009.
Ledeen concludes:
If we had a foreign policy team worthy of us, we’d be supporting the Iranian opposition, but Obama has proven that he prefers Khamenei to Mousavi.
I was baffled by this same sentiment back in 2009, and remain so today.
How might it be “worthy” of the United States to back a man who wants to turn Iran, as Mousavi declared in 2009, “to the pure principles of the Islamic revolution”? Lest there be any doubt, that “Islamic revolution” would be the Khomeini revolution of 1979. Mousavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, meanwhile, is the perfect sharia-state-mate. Author of the hejab-boosting “Beauty of Concealment and Concealment of Beauty,” Mrs. Mousavi “had a major role in forming `Gasht-e Khaharan-e Zeinab,’ the female street police units that harass women to enforce `Islamic behavior.’ ”
The facts suggest that what we were looking at in Iran then and and are looking at now is just another power struggle among competing Islamic blocs — not the romantic struggle, as our most prominent pundits have insisted, for a Western concept of liberty that literally does not exist within Islam.
But there is something in the Mousavi case that is even more disturbing. How is it possible to imagine that a man almost certainly involved in the 1983 truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut is now or ever a candidate for US support?
Back in 2009, Robert Baer wrote in Time magazine:
Before we go too far down the road cheering the forces of Iranian democracy, let’s not forget that its public face, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, has American blood on his hands. He was Iran’s Prime Minister during most of the 1980s, a time when the country was waging a terrorist campaign against the U.S.
Earlier this week, I received an e-mail from a Lebanese who was present at the creation of the country’s Iranian-backed, Shi’ite militia Hizballah in 1982 and on familiar terms with its most radical and violent members. He wrote: “Are you people crazy backing Mousavi, a patron of Hizballah’s terrorist wing?”
Indeed, Mousavi, Prime Minister from 1981 to 1989, almost certainly had a hand in the planning of the Iranian-backed truck-bombing attacks on the U.S. embassy in April 1983 and the Marine barracks in October of that same year. Mousavi, as my Lebanese contact reminded me, dealt directly with Imad Mughniyah, the man largely held responsible for both attacks
Admiral James A. “Ace” Lyons (US Navy, ret.) made the same connection between Mousavi and the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in an interview with CQ in 2009.
“He was prime minister,” said Lyons, who in 1983 was deputy chief of naval operations and deeply involved with Middle Eastern affairs, particularly concerning Iran. “He [Mousavi] was in a principal position and had to be aware of what was going on.”
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